I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes.

August 6, 2010

The amount you care about your job is proportional to the believability of the excuse for not going.

While my excuses began as believable dental and doctor appointments, as the agency I worked for went from a thriving business with over forty clients to trading while insolvent, I realised nobody cared if I was absent or what reasons I gave.
As there were no clients, when I did attend, I spent most of the day playing a game called 'Staring at the wall wondering what happy people are doing' and answering calls by pretending I was a confused Cantonese woman.
In a last ditch effort to keep the few remaining clients we had, we invited them to join us at a charity dinner to buy musical instruments for starving children. The dinner started normally, with Thomas, the business owner, talking about his hair and a staff member leaving in tears after being accused of stealing, but went downhill from there. By the fifth scotch, the entire table, including the Managing Director of McDonald's, sat in embarrassed silence as Thomas cried while telling a story about how, when he was twelve, his dog Trevor had died of testicular cancer. By scotch ten, Thomas had vomited onto the leg of one client and perforated another's arm with a fork while flamboyantly telling a story about his experience in a Phuket brothel.

I didn't bother giving an excuse for not turning up to work the next day.